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Extract from John Keegan -- seen
in our picture below receiving his knighthood on May 3, 2000
-- ,The Battle for History: Refighting World
War Two (Hutchinson, London, 1996):

THE
ROLE of leadership in the Second World War invests
biography with particular importance. There is a wealth of
biographical, and autobiographical, material. Churchill and
de Gaulle, indeed, both completed accounts of their war
experience which succeed as both history and memoir.

The
most valuable of books in this category, however, in my
view, is one that has been called "the autobiography Hitler
did not write" -- David Irving's Hitler's War. Irving
is a controversial figure, an Englishman who has identified
with the German war experience to a remarkable degree, who
has offered a cash award to anyone producing written
evidence of Hitler's authorisation of the "Final Solution,"
and who currently champions extreme right-wing politics in
Europe. Nevertheless, he is a historian of formidable
powers, having worked in all the major German archives,
discovered important deposits of papers himself, and
interviewed many of the survivors of their families and
intimates.

Hitler's War is unique in that it recounts the war
exclusively from the German side, and through the day-by-day
thinking and doings of Adolf Hitler. For Irving, Hitler is
not a monster but the rational war leader of a great power,
seeking to guide it to victory over other great powers whose
policies are as self-interested as Germany's. He is
nonetheless, a lonelier figure than Churchill or Roosevelt,
and bears psychological burdens they did not. At least
twice, during the Dunkirk campaign of 1940 and after the
failure of the Stalingrad offensive in 1942 43, he
experienced something akin to a nervous breakdown,
short-lived in 1940 but prolonged in 1943. His loss of
self-confidence after Stalingrad devolved power onto his
subordinates, notably Zeitzler, his army chief of staff, and
thereby drew Germany into the unwise Kursk offensive, which
lost the Wehrmacht its tank reserve and so consigned it
thereafter to fighting on the defensive. The picture Irving
presents of Hitler is of a struggler amid great events,
brilliantly successful at first. progressively borne down by
circumstance as the odds lengthen against him, but resilient
to the very end. If she accuses him of a single mistake, it
is that of declaring war against the United States in the
week of Pearl Harbor, a step nothing in the Tripartite Pact
obliged him to do and against which Ribbentrop his foreign
minister, argued in vain.

Yet,
Irving's Hitler is throughout a man knows better what is
good for Germany than do any of his helpmates or
subordinates, who has recurrent flashes of military genius,
who sacrifices his physical health to his cause, who eschews
any personal friendship except that with an idealised German
people itself. Among his co-operators, only Goebbels, his
minister of propaganda, approaches him in vision and
competence. The rest, even Himmler, self-proclaimed truest
of the true, ultimately think of themselves. It is they who
are responsible for the crassest error -- the policy of
genocide foremost -- and who betray both the leader and
their country.

No historian of the Second World War can afford to ignore
Irving. His depiction of Hitler, by its relation of the
war's development to the decisions and responses of
Führer headquarters, is a key corrective to the
Anglo-Saxon version, which relates the war's history solely
in terms of Churchillian defiance and of the Grand Alliance.
Nevertheless, it is a flawed vision, for it is untouched by
moral judgement. For Irving, the Second World War was a war
like other wars -- a naked struggle for national
self-interest -- and Hitler, one war leader among others.
Yet, the Second World War must engage our moral sense. Its
destructiveness, its disruption of legal and social order,
were on a scale so disordinate that it cannot be viewed as a
war among other wars; its opposition of ideologies,
democratic versus totalitarian, none the less stark because
democracy perforce allied itself with one form of
totalitarianism in the struggle against another, invariably
invests the war with moral content; above all, Hitler's
institution of genocide demands a moral commitment.

REVIEWING
ANOTHER book in The Times Literary
Supplement, April 24, 1980, the same John
Keegan, Defence Editor of The Daily
Telegraph, wrote:--

"Two books in English stand out from the vast
literature of the Second World War. Chester Wilmot's
The Struggle for Europe,published in 1952,
and David Irving's Hitler's War,which
appeared three years ago.

"They do so because, from exactly opposing angles of
vision, each tackles the strategy of the whole war and
makes impressive if doctrinaire sense of it.

"The second book has not yet worked its way into our
general understanding of the conflict, though it
undoubtedly will do so when controversy over its
sensationalist elements is exhausted."